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Information about AI from the News, Publications, and Conferences

If you are looking for an answer to the question What is Artificial Intelligence? and you only have a minute, then here's the definition the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence offers on its home page: "the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines."

However, if you are fortunate enough to have more than a minute, then please get ready to embark upon an exciting journey exploring AI (but beware, it could last a lifetime) …

This article seizes an opportune time to honor Marvin and his contributions and influence in artificial intelligence, science, and beyond. The article provides readers with some personal insights of Minsky from Danny Hillis, John McCarthy, Tom Mitchell, Erik Mueller, Doug Riecken, Aaron Sloman, and Patrick Henry Winston -- all members of the AI community that Minsky helped to found. The article continues with a brief resume of Minsky's research, which spans an enormous range of fields. It concludes with a short biographical account of Minsky's personal history.

Marvin Lee Minsky, a founder of the field of artificial intelligence and professor at MIT, celebrated his 80th birthday on August 9, 2007. This article seizes an opportune time to honor Marvin and his contributions and influence in artificial intelligence, science, and beyond. The article provides readers with some personal insights of Minsky from Danny Hillis, John McCarthy, Tom Mitchell, Erik Mueller, Doug Riecken, Aaron Sloman, and Patrick Henry Winston -- all members of the AI community that Minsky helped to found. The article continues with a brief resume of Minsky's research, which spans an enormous range of fields. It concludes with a short biographical account of Minsky's personal history.

To build a machine that has "common sense" was once a principal goal in the field of artificial intelligence. But most researchers in recent years have retreated from that ambitious aim. We are convinced, however, that no one such method will ever turn out to be "best," and that instead, the powerful AI systems of the future will use a diverse array of resources that, together, will deal with a great range of problems. To build a machine that's resourceful enough to have humanlike common sense, we must develop ways to combine the advantages of multiple methods to represent knowledge, multiple ways to make inferences, and multiple ways to learn.

To build a machine that has "common sense" was once a principal goal in the field of artificial intelligence. But most researchers in recent years have retreated from that ambitious aim. Instead, each developed some special technique that could deal with some class of problem well, but does poorly at almost everything else. We are convinced, however, that no one such method will ever turn out to be "best," and that instead, the powerful AI systems of the future will use a diverse array of resources that, together, will deal with a great range of problems. To build a machine that's resourceful enough to have humanlike common sense, we must develop ways to combine the advantages of multiple methods to represent knowledge, multiple ways to make inferences, and multiple ways to learn. We held a two-day symposium in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, to discuss such a project -- - to develop new architectural schemes that can bridge between different strategies and representations. This article reports on the events and ideas developed at this meeting and subsequent thoughts by the authors on how to make progress.